Building Bridges: Israeli-Palestinian Youth Peace Program
This paper examines Building Bridges, a nonprofit organization that brings together Israeli, Palestinian, and American youth through residential conflict resolution programs. The paper explores the program's seven core building blocks—identity, integration, socialization, perspective, gender lens, communication, and leadership development—and evaluates how shared living and skill-building activities work to break down stereotypes. It also addresses critiques of the program's individualized approach, challenges related to funding, safety, and participant self-selection, and the organization's efforts to measure attitudinal change through follow-up evaluation since its founding in 1994.
- Program Overview and Goals: Introduction to Building Bridges and its mission
- Approach and Activities: How residential programs build peace skills
- Critiques of the Program: Criticism from both sides of the conflict
- Challenges Facing the Organization: Funding, safety, and facilitation challenges
- Impact on Program Effectiveness: How challenges limit the program's reach
- Overcoming Challenges and Measuring Change: Monitoring attitudes and tracking long-term shifts
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper organizes its analysis around a clear question-and-answer structure, making it easy to follow the program's logic, critiques, and responses in sequence.
- It balances direct quotation from primary program materials with critical analysis, acknowledging the program's limitations rather than simply advocating for it.
- The self-selection critique—noting that participants are already drawn from more open-minded families—demonstrates sophisticated evaluative thinking about program reach and effectiveness.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates program evaluation methodology by systematically assessing an NGO's stated theory of change against real-world constraints. It uses the program's own documentation alongside an external assessment (Breeze & Feldman) to triangulate strengths and weaknesses, a technique common in nonprofit and social policy analysis.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a description of Building Bridges and its goals, then moves through how the program operates, critiques it has faced, practical challenges it encounters, how those challenges affect outcomes, and finally how the organization attempts to address them. The conclusion ties monitoring and evaluation back to the program's founding in 1994, providing a longitudinal perspective on its impact.
Program Overview and Goals
Building Bridges teaches communication skills to a diverse group of young Israeli, Palestinian, and American participants through skill-building activities. Students can "learn new perspectives through communication skills-building sessions as well as experiential, outdoor, and creative play workshops and day-to-day contact with each other. The activities are designed to expose participants to seven program building blocks: identity; integration; socialization; perspective; gender lens; communication; and leadership development" ("Program theory," 2014).
The ultimate goal of the organization is to create a more tolerant society by changing the minds of young people. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most longstanding and violent of recent memory. The hope is that by fostering interpersonal contact and positive feelings between the two groups—and affirming one another's humanity—the future can be more peaceful, versus the current stalemate that exists today.
Approach and Activities
Over the course of its residential programs, students live together. "This promotes the breakdown of stereotypes, and fosters the development of personal relationships" ("Program theory," 2014). Creative play and learning about the unique perspectives of others builds a more tolerant society one person at a time. The perspective of the program is specifically gendered: all participants learn skills traditionally associated with women, such as communitarian decision-making, while also developing leadership skills.
"Participants are encouraged to think about how to bring what they've learned back to their home communities, and are given tools in program planning and implementation to help them execute change projects in their home communities" ("Program theory," 2014).
Critiques of the Program
Building Bridges has faced criticism from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Because of the violence that has been waged on both sides of the conflict—often by or directed against young people, as many of those involved in the intifada have been children, and young Israelis have been killed in recent outbreaks of violence—the program's personalized approach, which emphasizes individual healing, makes many people uncomfortable.
The hope is that by changing individuals the larger society can be changed, but it could be argued that there is a limit to how much major change can be created with just one or two people. This does not necessarily mitigate the influence of violence in wider society or silence the voices of extremists on both sides. The most extreme voices are unlikely to allow their children to participate in the program. The children whose parents are willing to let them be involved already have a more nuanced view of the conflict.
Additionally, individual solutions and friendships—which already exist between Israelis and Palestinians in some quarters—do not necessarily generate macro-level solutions.
Works Cited
Breeze, Erin, and Feldman, Melodye. Building Bridges for Peace: An Intergroup Intervention for Israeli, Palestinian, and American Teens. Common Ground, 2008.
"Program theory." Building Bridges. 24 Nov. 2014.
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